LOVELAND -- A two-year moratorium on fracking within the city of Loveland has been cleared to move on to November's ballot.

Protect Our Loveland, advocates of the moratorium, submitted 124 petition sections with 3,704 signatures to the City Clerk's office on July 8. After poring over the documents for the past two weeks, City Clerk Terry Andrews said Tuesday that the petitions have met the threshold for required signatures.

The petition needed 2,253 valid signatures from registered voters in the city of Loveland in order to qualify for the general election in November, where voters will also chose City Council and Thompson School District Board of Education members. Andrews has verified 2,256 signatures.

"That's wonderful," said Protect Our Loveland organizer Sharon Carlisle, who had not yet received the correspondence on Tuesday. "I'm not surprised, but that's wonderful."

Before submitting the initiative petitions on July 8, Protect Our Loveland volunteers circulated petitions for weeks in response to the oil and gas regulations that were put in place in April by a split City Council. The proposed initiative is an ordinance that would place a two-year moratorium on the use of hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, to extract oil and gas within city limits.

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During that two-year break, which could be lifted upon a ballot measure, the city would be required to conduct full studies on the impacts of fracking on property values and human health.

City Manager Bill Cahill has said that the city would likely have to hire outside help for the studies at a cost that has not been determined.

The City Council has two choices now that the petition has been validated: according to state municipal law, they can either place the proposed ordinance on the ballot for voters to decide in November or they can enact the ordinance themselves. But with a regulatory system in place for oil and gas producers and with the council deciding at a study session to keep any future moratorium in the hands of a citizen-driven initiative, Carlisle is not counting on the council adopting the ordinance.

"We've just been assuming that we'll just go to the ballot," she said. "That's why we did this in the first place, because the council wouldn't do it ... I don't know why they would have changed their minds."

The City Council must decide what to do with the initiative by Sept. 6. In the meantime, Andrews said that she will continue validating signatures on the remaining petition sections.

Individuals have until Aug. 16 to file a protest as to the sufficiency of the petitions. No challenges have been filed to date, Andrews said.